Madame Fifi dons her flip-flops again

In the first frantic week of negotiations after last year’s election, the Mail dubbed Nick Clegg the Madame Fifi of British politics – one minute batting his eyelids at David Cameron, the next sneaking off to play footsie with Gordon Brown.

More than 19 months on, he is playing the same game, switching suitors from one day to the next in the hope of keeping all his options open.

Only last Friday, Mr Clegg was firmly behind Mr Cameron’s dramatic veto of the Franco-German plans for an EU-wide treaty to prop up the eurozone.

Flip flop: Nick Clegg has changed his stance on David Cameron's veto of EU treaty changes

The Prime Minister’s demands had been ‘modest and reasonable’, he said, while his spokesman confirmed he was ‘fully signed-up’ to the veto.

But today? Spinning on a one-cent coin, the Deputy Prime Minister is now ‘bitterly disappointed’ with the outcome in Brussels, which would have been ‘very different’, he says, if he had been handling the talks.

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And trotting out the tired old formula used by europhiles through the ages to justify every surrender to Brussels, he adds: ‘I think now there is a danger that the UK will be isolated and marginalised within the EU.’

Meanwhile, a ‘furious’ Business Secretary Vince Cable – who once boasted vaingloriously that his resignation would be the ‘nuclear option’ that would destroy the Coalition – is forced to deny that he is ‘considering his position’.

They just don’t get it, do they? They speak of losing our influence. But can’t they see it’s precisely because we have so little sway in the EU that Mr Cameron was forced to use his veto, after Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy flatly refused him even the most modest concessions?

'Nuclear option': Business Secretary Vince Cable has denied that he is 'considering his position'

What sort of influence is it, which can only be preserved by surrender?

The europhiles warn, too, that the UK is being relegated to the slow lane in a two-speed Europe. But who wants to be in the fast lane – with Greece, Portugal and Italy – when the traffic is hurtling towards disaster?

Fortunately for Mr Cameron, the British people do get it. As a poll showed yesterday, a resounding 62 per cent back him over his use of the veto, with only 19 per cent against.

Nor need he lose sleep over the diehard europhiles in his own party. The likes of Lord Heseltine – rearing up to pontificate like a waxwork dummy version of an elder statesman – may still be courted by the slavishly pro-Brussels BBC, but they have few followers among the Tories.

And would dear old Ken Clarke, who found the summit’s outcome ‘disappointing and very surprising’, really be such a serious loss to the Cabinet if he felt he could not remain?

Indeed, thanks paradoxically to the obduracy of Merkel and Sarkozy, Mr Cameron finds himself today in a position of huge strength and popularity.

His job now is to hold on to it.

This will mean fiercely resisting our EU partners’ attempts (and there will be many) to assume by stealth the powers he denied them by vetoing the treaty.

As for Mr Clegg and the rest of the Lib Dems, they face a stark choice between their principles and their ministerial cars. On past form, we suspect Madame Fifi will plump for the latter.